Whenever Lance Armstrong went into his bully routine and publicly accused him of leading a witch hunt to take down a seven-time Tour de France champion, U.S. Anti-Doping Agency chief executive Travis Tygart refused to back down.

As three separate death threats in August from Armstrong supporters were directed at him, two via email and one in a letter, Tygart maintained his composure by leaning on his Jacksonville roots.

He learned the elements of fair play and sportsmanship in the Hendricks Avenue Baptist Church leagues for baseball, basketball and football. Being on state championship basketball and baseball teams at The Bolles School in 1988 and '89, where he started on the left side of the infield with Chipper Jones, taught him the value of teamwork.

Most important, before the USADA case against Armstrong resulted in arguably the most damning evidence ever gathered against a doping sports icon, Tygart dealt with the intense pressures by thinking of family. He remembered his uncle, Duval County Circuit Judge Frederick Tygart, also had his life threatened during his career and wouldn't let it unduly influence the task in front of him.

"The lessons of sport and what I learned growing up in Jacksonville, those are the things that get you through tough times like this," Tygart said in a phone interview Thursday from his USADA office in Colorado Springs, Colo. "Clean athletes appreciate us not bowing to political pressure or the personal attacks.

"If we're going to cave to attacks by those attempting to cover up their sporting fraud, we might as well shut down. That would mean we're afraid and don't have the courage to support clean athletes. You have to endure those attacks. We just do our job based on the evidence we have."

Ultimately, the evidence against Armstrong was so overwhelming, he didn't even bother to contest USADA's findings, which resulted in a lifetime ban and being stripped of his seven Tour de France titles. Several of his sponsors, including Nike, which has stood by many athletes in the face of scandal, have dumped Armstrong. He also resigned Wednesday from his cancer-fighting foundation, Livestrong, that was a beacon of hope for many people ravaged by the disease.

Even though he was viewed by Armstrong forces as a villain for daring to challenge the loud, vociferous doping denials of a former cycling hero, Tygart takes no great pleasure in seeing him publicly disgraced. He just wishes it didn't have to come to USADA obtaining 1,000-plus pages of sworn testimony, including 11 Armstrong teammates, who admitted to his orchestrating an elaborate doping program for his U.S. Postal Service Cycling, to bring full disclosure to a decade of cheating.

Starting with a law firm that represented USADA, then becoming its in-house general counsel and CEO, Tygart has had various roles in every major doping case on the sports landscape for the last 10 years.

It includes exposing the likes of 2006 Tour de France winner Floyd Landis and American track star Marion Jones, as well as the BALCO scandal that implicated Barry Bonds and other major-league ballplayers. But Tygart had never seen doping as sophisticated as what Armstrong pulled off, especially the bullying of teammates and employees required to maintain years of secrecy.

"This is unlike anything we've ever seen before, a team-run drug program designed to groom riders and pressure them to use drugs and make sure they didn't get caught," said Tygart. "It was all aimed at winning Tour de France after Tour de France. This isn't a few ballplayers caught up in BALCO. This is like the general manager of the New York Yankees saying, 'We're going to win every championship and make sure we use every corked bat, spitball and steroid to be the best.'

"I think what I learned from BALCO is athletes and their enablers will go to great lengths to ensure they're not ultimately held accountable. Whether it's lying under oath like Marion Jones, or vilifying other athletes being truthful [about dope use], they'll go to great lengths to not be caught. The bullying in the Armstrong case was aimed at other cyclists and witnesses. They knew if anybody spoke out, the whole house of cards would come tumbling down."

The irony in Tygart becoming the face of anti-doping, and Armstrong's adversary, is that he wanted no part of being a lawyer after receiving his undergraduate degree in philosophy from North Carolina.

Though his family tree is littered with attorneys, including his brother, sister and father, Tygart soured on the law in the early 1990s after seeing the O.J. Simpson trial and the Anita Hill proceedings on Capitol Hill.

"It just seemed like a poisonous environment," Tygart said.

When he came home to Jacksonville, he served as a substitute teacher in the public school system, then taught world history, economics and government for two years at Bolles. Shortly after getting married, he changed his mind and enrolled at SMU law school.

He then worked in commercial litigation in Dallas for one year before obtaining a sports law position with a firm in Colorado Springs.

"I've always been driven to make a difference, I felt the time was right to move to a new challenge," said Tygart.

In a decade with USADA, Tygart has learned one universal truth about cheating athletes: The burden of beating the system and trying to maintain secrecy weighs heavily on them.

He saw it firsthand in 2010 after coming out of a Los Angeles hearing where Landis, after years of vigorous denials, finally 'fessed up to doping.

"A fan of Landis came up to him and said, 'You got railroaded,' even though Landis acknowledged during the meeting that he was a doper," said Tygart.

"After the guy walked off, Landis looked at me and said, 'That's the lie I can't keep living with, knowing I'm just a fraud.' That's what you hear from athletes. A lot of them never wanted to cheat, but they're put in a culture where they feel it's the only way they can win."

Tygart, 41, expects that the International Cycling Union, which has been at odds with USADA on the Armstrong case, will not exercise its right to appeal the decision.

Armstrong, the ultimate fighter as a cancer survivor, has lost his will to keep fighting USADA because he knows he's been exposed as a liar and a cheat.

Tygart would like to see a contrite Armstrong come clean, but isn't sure it'll happen.

"Sometimes you have to go to the bottom to rise to the top again," said Tygart. "If I were advising him, I'd say apologize to all the people you hurt and they'll be quick to forgive. That could be a much better legacy for the sport than anything any of these riders ever did on a bike.

"All that matters here is the truth prevailed. For clean athletes, that's the right outcome. It's sad it came to this, but it's good that it was revealed."

@jaxguy11 I do think he is guilty. But I am not naive enough to think that this guy did not have an agenda. Nor do I think any of Lance's teammates were speaking about Lance for the good of cycling. Everyone had an agenda. But most of all I do think the word of a person that has been found guilty of doping is not enough to convict someone else. Lance has earned the right to at least fail that urine test or blood test before the public hanging.